Brock - September 5

So this week I´ve seen everything. A goat, a dog with two different colored eyes, a stork, maggots in our house (like huge ones), a giant spider swinging around in our garage (which my companion made me kill), a foot doctor tear part of my toenail off, a giant McDonald´s sign, and weird scone type things that we made that ended up really weirdly shaped. The most important thing that I saw, however, was four baptisms! This lady (the one that hated church) has been the most persecuted investigator I have ever seen be baptized. Like, I´ve seen investigators with more opposition, but none of them were baptized. Her mom is a less-active from like twenty years ago who didn´t want her to be baptized so soon, her brother nearly strangled her sister-in-law to death the Saturday night before the baptism and she went to break up the fight and take the kids to her house. Her sister has been sending her anti-Mormon stuff for a week straight, like everyone from her old church is visiting her to try and get her to return, and her husband has be blowing cigarette smoke in her face nonstop, trying to get her to fall and smoke again. But, in spite of it all, she was baptized, with her three children. It was good. I got really sad though, because I just don´t know why she just has to get hit with everything all at the same time. A month ago, I would have never thought we would have visited her more than one time, let alone be baptized. She has a lot of willpower. I hope she is able to continue. 

We have been running around this week trying to get this to happen. Elder Jillard only has a few weeks left and he wants to go out working. It´s a really good attitude. I hope that I can be like that when I am at the end. 

Just a quick catch-up for maybe some of the more concerning things I mentioned. So today we were all in the other elders´ room talking about some scripture things that we had found in personal study. Then one of them went out of the room and knocked a broom over. Underneath the broom we found a bunch of maggots, about the size of a grain of rice. Going into panic mode, and being four elders, we decided the best way to get rid of them would be to make a torch out of a broken broomstick and spray deodorant at them until they stopped moving. Then we went into a cleaning frenzy. As I was cleaning the kitchen, I noticed a few more between the fridge and the wall. So we pulled the fridge out of the way and found even bigger maggots. Like, two of them were the size of maybe Ella´s pinky finger. Out came our makeshift flamethrower again. We also found a giant spider (not tarantula, but the biggest a non-tarantula spider can be) in our garage swinging around like a maniac. My comp made me kill it with a broken bed slat. We also made something called bolinha de chuva, which means rain balls. They were kinda like Grandma´s scones, but the dough wasn´t thick enough to form it into a shape, so Elder Jillard just drizzled it into the oil. It turned out really oddly shaped but good. My ingrown toenail came back with a vengeance and eventually I was forced into seeking medical attention. The doctor sprayed a few things and rubbed a few creams into it that did nothing and then straight up tore the whole side of my nail clean off. (Very fun, I can assure you. Also, I wil need to take money out of my personal account to pay.)

Anyway, that was our crazy week. It´s cool to see Parker going through the MTC. He looks like he´s having a much better experience than I had, and he´s already learned Spanish faster than I did. I love you guys.

Elder B. Blaylock